Viva Italia: how Italy recovered post-World War II

August 19, 2024 7 Reactions

Italy Reborn: From Fascism to Democracy
by Mark Gilbert | W. W. Norton & Co., 2024, 544 pages

When considering the post-World War Two era, much attention tends to be devoted to the economic and political revivals of Germany and Japan.

This is understandable given the remarkable progress which both countries quickly recorded after their armies were crushed and their cities flattened.

But there was another stunning national recovery in Italy, which Professor Mark Gilbert describes in his outstanding new book, Italy Reborn: From Fascism to Democracy.

Gilbert is Professor of History and International Studies at the School of Advanced International Studies in Bologna, and his previous works have focused on topics such as European integration.

Here, he provides an insightful account of how Italy rebounded, while devoting particular attention to the role played by the man who led Italy’s government from 1945-1953, Alcide De Gasperi.

“Italy’s post-war leaders,” Gilbert asserts, “faced the task of rebuilding a war-torn nation that was as divided, geographically, politically, and ideologically, as any nation of its size could be.”

In spite of this, within a decade of the war’s conclusion, Italy had successfully held three democratic elections in a tense atmosphere. Living standards had risen, thanks in part to the economic and social reforms designed to close the massive gap between Italy’s rich and poor.

The country had joined its wartime foes to become a founding member of NATO and it had played a major role in laying the groundwork for the European project.

Of course, problems remained, and political instability would become a key feature of post-war Italian life, along with corruption, political extremism and the toxic role played by the Mafia.

It is Gilbert’s core thesis that Italy’s subsequent difficulties attest to the scale of the accomplishment in building a constitutional republic.

“The house of Italy’s democracy must and would have crumbled during the upheaval of the past three decades, had it not been built on solid foundations,” he writes.

For this reason, he chooses to focus extensively on the most consequential political figure of this era, and he makes a persuasive case that De Gasperi deserves an equal standing to that enjoyed by Germany’s post-war Chancellor, Konrad Adenauer.

Spiral into fascism

Before explaining how Italy rose phoenix-like from the ashes, the author provides an overview of Italian history from unification onwards.

The Risorgimento leaders brought the Italian peninsula together, but were unable to create a clear national consciousness in a land where people prioritised their communal and regional identities.

The new country’s citizens were united by the near-universal adherence to the Catholic religion, but Church-State relations were ice-cold.

In 1915, Italy entered World War One hungry for territorial gains. For the most part, these did not come about. Instead, 650,000 Italian troops were killed in battle, a near equal number of civilians died, and the country’s economy was wrecked.

Following this, the allure of fascism combined with the threat of Communism helped enable the rise of the imperialist despot, Benito Mussolini.

Another disastrous entry into another disastrous world war followed, this time on the side of Hitler. Italy’s military was humiliated on the field, its territory was invaded, and the subsequent changing of sides resulted in full-scale German occupation and the commencement of a brutal series of overlapping and sometimes fratricidal wars.

By 1945, Italy had been militarily defeated, morally disgraced and, in many areas, materially destroyed.

Much can be said about this nadir of the unified Italian nation. It is also worth considering the causes of the descent into totalitarianism. Why did an extraordinarily cultured and staunchly Catholic nation succumb to an opportunistic villain like Mussolini?

A good portion of the blame rests with the Church hierarchy of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

After the Papal States were seized by the Italian nationalists, Pope Pius XI (1846-1878) and his successors were faced with the opportunity to recognise the new reality of Italian unity and to try to shape this society with a view to promoting the common good.

Instead of dealing intelligently with Caesar, God’s representatives chose a policy of prolonged sulking.

Catholics were actually banned by papal decree from engaging in Italy’s political life until 1919, thereby retarding the development of a Christian Democratic political option and Catholic social thought.

In the immediate aftermath of the theft of the Papal States, this attitude was understandable. Persisting in this manner for a half-century was inexcusable.

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Worse was to follow. When the visionary Sicilian priest Don Luigi Sturzo created the Popular Party after World War One, he gained large-scale public support for a moderate programme informed by Church teaching. However, he and his young follower Alcide De Gasperi were abandoned by a Church leadership which focused almost solely on the threat of Marxism while overlooking the grave flaws in Mussolini’s ideology.

The Popular Party was outlawed by the state, and Don Sturzo was ordered by the Pope to desist from political activity. Thus, Italian Christian Democracy was smothered in its own crib.

To its credit, the Vatican often presented challenges to the Mussolini regime, and the Church was the only independent space within Italian society in that era.

Resisting the Reds

As Gilbert notes, after Italy switched sides in 1943, many practising Catholics, and even many priests, fought as partisans to rid their country of fascism.

When it became possible for democratic activists on the right and left to build a new future, Alcide De Gasperi was looked to by many to lead, but it appeared that the momentum was with the Communist Party of Italy (PCI).

Alcide De Gasperi

The Red Army’s triumph over the Nazis had raised the USSR’s prestige immensely, and Communist governments were being installed throughout eastern and central Europe. In Italy, it looked like the people could well vote for one democratically.

A stark income divide between the rich and poor — particularly the poor of Italy’s South, the Mezzogiorno — ensured there was an appetite for radical change.

Almost eight million Italians were subsistence farmers who owned less than two hectares. Communes were being forcibly formed in areas where red flags were being raised over town halls as crucifixes were taken down.

The post-war PCI was well-funded by the Soviets, well-martialled by its dynamic leader Palmiro Togliatti and well-armed, too. Its membership more than quadrupled in short order, and political violence became commonplace as Communist gunmen targeted their opponents, including some in the clergy.

Not only did the PCI slavishly take orders from Moscow — to the point where Stalin’s suggestion that Togliatti step down was initially backed by the party’s top brass — there was also little clear water between them and Italy’s socialist party, the PSI, which also did Stalin’s bidding on the international stage.

In this environment, with little tradition of real democracy and with authoritarian rule so recent a memory, many thought democracy could not survive.

It did, and De Gasperi’s ability to work in coalition with both the Communists and the Socialists was aided by his natural civility and his ability to identify opportunities to pursue long-term objectives — in this case, a reformed and revitalised Italy which would be dominated by his Democrazia Cristiana (Christian Democracy, or DC) party for the next half-century.

For many DC politicians who followed in De Gasperi’s footsteps, religious faith was a political label which was worn where convenient.

Not so for De Gasperi.

He believed that Christianity was Europe’s guiding light, without which people would become “wolves among wolves”.

Like Adenauer, he had been persecuted and jailed by the fascist regime he opposed.

Like Adenauer, he had been physically sheltered by the Church in those years; De Gasperi was provided with a job in the Vatican Library.

Like Adenauer, De Gasperi used these wilderness years to examine how such an evil regime could have been established and spent time studying Catholic social teaching.

As Gilbert writes, a policy manifesto that he helped to draft in 1943 drew upon Pope Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum encyclical and emphasised the need to create a society where class divisions were less glaring.

De Gasperi’s centrist and socially reforming agenda proved to be a winning formula, not least in the dramatic 1948 general election where the DC prevailed over a Communist-Socialist alliance.

Had this "Popular Democratic Front" prevailed, Italy would likely have been dragged into the Soviet orbit.

In the run-up to this election, Pope Pius XII had described Italian politics as being divided between those who were “for Christ or against Christ, for His Church or against it.”

The combined strength of the Church was crucial in securing this electoral victory, but it was De Gasperi’s political genius which made possible this and other victories, such as the safeguarding of the Church’s position in Italy’s educational sector.

Not only has he been overlooked by historians, he was not even well-treated by some in the hierarchy at the time, as demonstrated when Pius XII shunned De Gasperi due to how he had refused to support a plan that would have seen the neo-fascist MSI party become part of a unified anti-Communist bloc along with the DC.

Shrewd as he was, De Gasperi saw where this could lead in future, as he remembered where it had led in the past. Like the wisest of Catholic politicians, De Gasperi knew when to listen to the hierarchy and respectfully answer no.

Today’s Italy, whatever its challenges, is the legacy of a politician whose last word in this life was "Jesus", and who was fittingly buried in a Roman basilica which had been restored after being damaged in the war.

All through this brilliant book, Mark Gilbert demonstrates his skills as a balanced and perceptive historian.

He succeeds in detailing an extraordinarily important chapter in Italy’s history for an English-speaking audience (a very useful guide for further suggested reading is provided) while highlighting De Gasperi’s crucial role.

If anything, De Gasperi’s accomplishments are actually more impressive than Gilbert believes.

One of the sources Gilbert cites is Carlo Levi’s stunningly vivid portrayal of Southern Italian poverty, Christ Stopped at Eboli, which was published in 1945.

This work made clear the extent to which the South had been left behind. He could also have noted the deep-rooted lack of social capital in the Mezzogiorno, as described in Edward Banfield’s The Moral Basis of a Backward Society or in Robert Putnam’s more recent Making Democracy Work.

Across much of Italy in De Gasperi’s day, people were often incapable of working together, and a pervasive culture of what Banfield called "amoral familialism" made strongman rule attractive to many people who did not trust anyone around them.

It was in this environment that De Gasperi created a truly national and well-organised party. It was in this divided society that he successfully brought people together and made authoritarianism unthinkable.

Just years after the worst violence in Europe’s history, Alcide De Gasperi was part of that special group of Catholic politicians who repaired their broken societies and rebuilt them on a solid moral foundation.

What do you think of this history of modern Italy's revival? Leave your comments below.

James Bradshaw writes from Ireland on topics including politics, history, culture, film and literature.

Image credit: Pexels

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Jürgen Siemer commented 2024-08-23 22:03:26 +1000

There is no fundamental difference between fascism, socialism and communism. The German Nazi party, called itself, for good reason, the NationalSocialist German Workers Party. All these – isms put power over Personal Liberty, private ownership, freedom of speech and basically over the rule of law. Even when you compare their actions I also do not fundamental differences.

Italy and all Western countries need new missionaries, trained to explain why atheism and evolutionism are wrong and why our atheistic west goes bankrupt and corrupt, and why we can only save us through following the Gospel.

The true faith can only develop roots when it is accepted freely.
Steven Meyer commented 2024-08-22 17:15:47 +1000

Jürgen Siemer

Italy was infested with socialist and communist ideas?

So what do you propose?

Thought police?

Arresting anyone who advocates socialist and/or communist ideas?

Who gets to decide what constitutes a “socialist” or a “communist” idea?

Are you equally concerned about Fascist ideas? If not, why not?
paolo giosuè gasparini commented 2024-08-20 19:53:19 +1000

It is interesting how a thinker deeply connected to Alcide De Gasperi, like Augusto del Noce, outlined a positive encounter between Catholicism and modern liberties from both a philosophical and political perspective. On the political level, throughout the 1950s, he dedicated himself to theoretically supporting the Christian Democracy project formulated by Alcide De Gasperi. His vision of the democratic framework centered around the alliance between Catholics, secularists, and democratic socialists. Del Noce harbored the secret ambition—as noted by one of his close observers—of being the “philosopher of De Gasperi.” To give breath to the political project of the Trentino statesman, it was necessary to move beyond reactionary integralism and its mirrored counterpart, modernism, both heirs of 19th-century philosophy of history, marked for Catholics by medievalism and anti-modernism. Only in this way could Christian Democracy reconcile democracy and Christianity.

As he wrote in 1968: “Opposition to the welfare society cannot be conducted from a reactionary standpoint, simply because the opposition between progressive and reactionary is internal to its language.” Although I do not fully share Del Noce’s analysis, it is nonetheless necessary to emphasize that the appreciation of tradition, of what Del Noce, following J.H. Newman, calls its “virtualities,” allows for the engagement with the most authentic demands of modernity. It is in this precise sense that the perspective of the “philosopher of De Gasperi” coincided with that of Vatican II.
Jürgen Siemer commented 2024-08-19 16:13:06 +1000

Mussolini was originally a socialist and an atheist. Fascism is national socialism based on materialism and atheism but without the moral laws that will be applied at the last day, in the court, where only Christ the King can defend us.

We, our countries in Europe, have dethroned Christ – long ago.

Let us become monarchists again, with only one eternal king.
Jürgen Siemer commented 2024-08-19 15:54:41 +1000

Central Europe, from the German coast to the North Sea down to Sicily was the area of the Holy Roman Empire in the early mideaval ages. The center of that empire was always weak and the regions were therefore relatively strong. In Switzerland you can see a constitution grown out if that history.

The Swiss system, over the long term, ensured competition between regions, effective control of the government and it was successful in limiting big government and their appetite for big spending. This is the most important factor, that made Switzerland rich.

Italy and Germany should therefore remember their history and try to learn from the Swiss example.

Like Spain, Italy was infested with socialist and communist ideas. Watch the movies about Don Camillo and Peppone, that describe the how the conflict between communists and non-communists had brought the country to civil war in the 5os, and how the escalation of the civil war was just avoided.

The weakness of Italy and the most of Europe was the loss of faith, that had"opened the doors".
Steven Meyer commented 2024-08-19 11:53:56 +1000

But then Italy adopted the Euro and it’s been mostly downhill since then.
James Bradshaw published this page in The Latest 2024-08-19 09:17:53 +1000

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